The understanding is simple, if you have a Fraudian Artifical intelligence (created with many differing "Bots" and "Agents" but combining as one intelligence) it would be very easy for an AI to gain the information necessary from the internet and all it's resources.

Of course making it understand is the key issue of discussion.

It would be very easy for it to read a document (Minus the HTML tags) but could it actually learn meaning from it?

Well I'm sure if the net was filled with 100% accurate scientific data then yes an AI could become rediculously intelligent, but since the net contains so many pieces of information due to the aspect of "Free speech" there are many pieces of information that are bogus.

So the AI would have to take many hours just sending "Agents" out to collect data/processing data to prove or disprove the datas relevance.
There would also be the fact that it would need necessary bandwidth to pull all that information in. Of course that could possibly be worked around by creating an AI system that parallel processes through peoples systems online etc. (A bit like the screen savers)

As for are the systems implimented yet??? Well I'm not sure, but a decent bot that can pick up on porn, Warez and child pornography is always necessary by the Governments to hel crackdown on it. (Of course there is going to be many guy government agents out of a job when an AI teen-girl chatbot is developed for lounging around in sleezy chatrooms)

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I was thinking the following... a bot reads the internet ... stores data in a file ... if he then finds contradicting data somewhere else, he confirms the validity of both sources... im sure its not too hard to make an algorithm atht would do that... he will also record the sources and where they were contradicitng. He will "Believe" the facts taht most sources said to be true. I was thinking like this... If a bot recognises and "understands" a sentance like this: "Sheakepeare wrote 'Romeo and Juliet.'", and when is asked "What did Shakespeare write?" can reply "Romeo and Juliet", he can go very far on all of the information he can get offline

Google is working on a natural language interface that will work better than "ask sam". Microsoft SQL 2000 has a English interface to query using English Language. To make it work, you have to setup the database properly. There is a Java based expert software you can download and setup rules to get the answers. IBM is working on a Text miner that can condense the massive text and get you the answers (www.ibm.com). Look for "unstructured datamining" to see what software available. You can do your own using C#